The story of this political moment keeps getting written like President Donald Trump is the main character — his impulses, his conflicts, his latest post on Truth Social.
But the more important story is happening one branch over, where a Republican-controlled Congress has spent the last several weeks demonstrating, in real time, what it looks like when a legislature declines to legislate.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, introduced articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for carrying out unlawful orders, including keeping troops deployed without congressional authorization — squarely Congress's job to examine.
The articles were never going to pass, and that wasn't the point. What matters is what Speaker of the House Mike Johnson did next: recess the House early, ahead of the midterms, a move that also stalled Massie's other project, a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II.
During the same week in a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel spent a chunk of a five-hour session fielding questions about a policy change removing bestiality as an automatic disqualifier for FBI applicants.
It's a real question, but it consumed the hearing's attention while Patel's more consequential claims about crime statistics and FBI leadership churn went largely unexamined — exactly the kind of Article I oversight the committee system exists to handle seriously.
Then, over the weekend, came a warning of a different order of magnitude. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that artificial intelligence (AI) development is moving too fast and that companies need to slow down deliberately — an assessment Sam Altman and Elon Musk, not exactly natural allies, both found themselves agreeing with.
When the people building the technology start telling Washington to hurry up and regulate them, that is not a partisan talking point. That is a fire alarm.
Congress's response, when it returned from recess with only four legislative days left before campaign season, was to do almost nothing.
Johnson's own words to reporters are the most damning evidence available: "We do not want to jump in. The reflex of legislative bodies is to cover things up with red tape and hyper-regulation. If you do that, then you lose your edge."
That is not an argument against a specific bill. It is an excuse for not governing at all — dressed up as competitiveness. And it wasn't isolated: Sen. Rand Paul blocked a colleague's attempt to pass a modest, bipartisan AI "kill switch" bill by unanimous consent because Congress didn't yet have enough facts to act.
The pattern is the same: when a decision or even a debate arrives at Congress's door, the institutional reflex is to find a reason not to open it.
Article I of the Constitution put the legislature first for a reason: the framers wanted the branch closest to the people to decide things, not just occupy the building. A Congress that won't vote, won't examine, won't legislate isn't neutral — it's ceding that ground by default.
None of this is about whether Hegseth committed misconduct, what an AI kill switch should look like, or how strict Epstein-related disclosure ought to be. Congress isn't being asked to solve those questions — it's being asked to show up and try, hold the vote, sit through the hearing, read the bill.
A Republican majority that recesses to dodge an impeachment fight it could have easily defeated on the merits, and that shrugs at researchers warning about existential risk because acting might be politically inconvenient before an election, isn't exercising judgment. It's abdicating the job.
The presidency will always attract the cameras. But our republic was built to run on the branch that doesn't need them — the one whose entire purpose is to do the slow, unglamorous work of deciding things. Right now, that branch is choosing not to.
Congress only has something to lose if losing is a real possibility. Right now, too many members have concluded it isn't. That's the only check voters hold — and the only one that will make abdication cost something, whoever's in charge.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
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